Freed from a world of secret abductions, illegal imprisonment and torture
Posted: October 3, 2006
Muhammad al-Assad “disappeared“ in 2003 and was held in secret detention at the request of the United States. Photo: Amnesty International
Over the last five years, thousands of people have been detained without charge or trial and ill-treated in the name of counter-terrorism. People like Muhammad al-Assad.
Muhammad al-Assad's story begins on December 26, 2003. He was at home in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, sitting down to dinner with his wife, when an immigration officer and two men from the state security forces turned up at his door. They forced a hood over his head, threw him in the back of a car, and sped away.
For much of the next two and a half years, al-Assad was held in a network of US-run detention centres, and moved in secret from country to country and from prison to prison.
He had no idea where he was being held, or even which country he was being held in. Some of the cells he was kept in had no windows, and for months at a time he did not know if it was day or night.
His family heard nothing of him until he was flown to a jail in Yemen in May 2005. Amnesty International campaigned on his behalf, and, in March 2006, he was finally released from prison.